Wednesday, April 8, 2015

'perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement'

Woolf’s grand aim in this exhausting labor—labor that perforce took time and concentration away from her novel-writing—was to be “able to make not merely thousands of people interested in literature; but millions.” She despaired at her failure. But the essays contained here—relics of that now-disdained Age of Print—are for the ages, and in that longest of long terms, thanks to these volumes, Woolf’s ambition might yet be achieved.- Benjamin Schwarz on The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume VI: 1933-1941

mothers and men

Hither rushed all the throng, streaming to the banks; mothers and men and bodies of high-souled heroes, their life now done, boys and unwedded girls, and sons placed on the pyre before their fathers’ eyes; thick as the leaves of the forest that at autumn’s first frost drop and fall, and thick as the birds that from the seething deep flock shoreward, when the chill of the year drives them overseas and sends them into sunny lands.